Published May 15, 2026, 3:30 PM EDT

Ayush Pande is a PC hardware and gaming writer. When he's not working on a new article, you can find him with his head stuck inside a PC or tinkering with a server operating system. Besides computing, his interests include spending hours in long RPGs, yelling at his friends in co-op games, and practicing guitar.

Ask the hardcore tinkering community about the best Network Attached Storage practices, and you’re bound to have some veterans claiming a NAS should be treated as a storage machine, not an experimentation node. Truth be told, I agree with them wholeheartedly, but I’d tweak that statement to replace storage “machine” with storage “server.”

Despite their somewhat weak computing prowess, a NAS can do a lot more than just store PC files and run automated backup workflows. Now, I wouldn’t recommend going all out with your home lab experiments on your NAS, because that’s a recipe for disaster (and yes, I speak from experience).…